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    Pauses for Pentecost: 50 Words for Easter People
    Pauses for Pentecost: 50 Words for Easter People
    Pauses for Pentecost: 50 Words for Easter People
    Ebook112 pages2 hours

    Pauses for Pentecost: 50 Words for Easter People

    By Trevor Hudson

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    About this ebook

    How do you prepare for Pentecost?

    As followers of Christ, we are invited to become Easter people filled with the Holy Spirit. The Resurrection is the center of the Christian faith. Without it there would be no Christian story, Christian church, or Christian way of life.

    Did you know that the Christian calendar sets aside a season of 50 days between Easter and Pentecost? The Easter season, sometimes called Eastertide, includes our Lord's ascension and leads to the Day of Pentecost, when Christians remember the outpouring of the Holy Spirit on Jesus' first followers.

    Have you ever taken 50 days to deliberately walk the path from Easter to Pentecost? Trevor Hudson writes, "If we are willing to take the time to pause, the season of Eastertide can become a time punctuated with precious moments of encounter with our risen Lord."

    Pauses for Pentecost offers 50 brief meditations that guide you to reflect on a biblical word and scripture passage, then do a simple daily practice. The daily practices do not take much time, and they are designed to let the new life of the Resurrection and the power of Pentecost flow into your life. Discover how to open your heart and mind more fully to the joy of Christ, the presence of God, and the power of the Holy Spirit.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherUpper Room Books
    Release dateJan 1, 2018
    ISBN9780835817653
    Pauses for Pentecost: 50 Words for Easter People
    Author

    Trevor Hudson

    Trevor Hudson has been in the Methodist ministry for the past thirty odd years, spending most of this time in and around Johannesburg, South Africa. Presently he is part of the pastoral team at Northfield Methodist Church in Benoni where he preaches and teaches on a weekly basis. He has written nine books, including A Mile in My Shoes and Listening to the Groans, which have recently been published in the U.S. Much of his ministry has been shaped by two passions: helping ordinary people experience the transforming presence and power of Jesus in their everyday lives and helping people build the kind of local faith community which seeks to take seriously the suffering of those around them. His interests include watching sports, walking and running, discovering new places, reading and writing.

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      Book preview

      Pauses for Pentecost - Trevor Hudson

      INTRODUCTION

      As followers of Christ, we are invited to become Easter people filled with God’s Spirit. The Resurrection is the life-giving center of our faith. Without it there would not be a Christian story, a Christian church, or a Christian spirituality. Certainly there would be no Ascension or Pentecost to celebrate. The Resurrection event proclaims that Christ lives beyond crucifixion, validates as true his teachings about how to live in the kingdom of God, and reveals that his cross was indeed not a defeat but a victory of God’s self-giving love over all the destructive powers of sin and death. Turning from our old ways of life and becoming linked in faith with the risen Jesus today is to experience a greater fullness of life wherever we are. This is the astonishing, amazing good news of our faith.

      Wonderfully, there is a time set aside in the Christian calendar for us to enter more fully into this good news. It has traditionally been called Eastertide, or the Easter Season. Eastertide refers to those fifty days from Easter Sunday to the Day of Pentecost. In the early church’s calendar, Eastertide represented the middle of the church year. In this season, we follow the risen Christ and his encounters with his disciples up to that moment when he ascends to his Father, and then we wait for ten days until his Spirit is poured out on them. We could say that the resurrection of Jesus finds its glorious fulfillment in the sending of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost. Hence the combination of Easter and Pentecost themes in the title of this little book: Pauses for Pentecost: 50 Words for Easter People.

      Easter is also a season that many Christians have forgotten! Certainly our surrounding consumeristic culture does not know what to do with it. Somehow, Resurrection and Pentecost cannot be packaged, consumed, or marketed. As a result, we often limit our engagement with this extraordinary season to Easter Sunday Communion, perhaps an Ascension worship service forty days later, and then ten days after that a Pentecost Sunday celebration. When have we ever taken all these fifty days to consciously and deliberately walk the path from the Resurrection to Pentecost? In my conversations with others, I have discovered very few who do.

      We are all the poorer for this neglect. The days between Jesus’ resurrection and the giving of his Spirit are filled with his unseen presence, available to those who love him in a new and powerful way. Similarly, if we are willing to take the time to pause, Eastertide can punctuate this time for us with precious encounters with our risen Lord. Each time he comes to his disciples, whether in one of those resurrection encounters or in the power of his Holy Spirit, he provides for the special needs of an individual or a group. In the same way, he comes to us to console and to challenge us as we open ourselves to him.

      In this little book, I am interested in exploring how we can live today as Easter people filled with God’s Spirit. How do we live, in the midst of our relationships and daily work, a life permeated by the present companionship of the risen and ascended Jesus? What does it mean to be genuinely empowered by his Spirit in a world characterized by painful divisions, immeasurable human suffering, and the relentless devastation of creation itself? How do we respond and react to bad news, both personal and social, in a world in which God has raised Christ from the dead? In a nutshell, I want us to discover how we can cultivate an Easter imagination and practice a Pentecost life where we are.

      Here is how I suggest we go about doing this. First, let us joyfully claim Eastertide as one of God’s special time-gifts. Along with Advent and Lent, let us make sure that this neglected season finds its rightful place in our Christian calendar. As we have seen, it will draw us into the crucial events of Jesus’ resurrection and ascension, as well as the gift of the Pentecost experience. Let us commit ourselves to walk through this time day by day so that we may experience what it really means to live as Easter people empowered by the breath of the Holy Spirit.

      Second, I’ve complied fifty biblical words to help us reimagine our lives as Easter people filled with God’s Spirit. These words will come from scriptural passages that will draw us into our risen lives with Christ. I hope that they will point us toward that vivid aliveness, ever-increasing joy, and inner freedom that the early disciples experienced as they encountered Jesus in his resurrected presence and in his Spirit. Certainly the remarkable changes that we see in their lives, after the crucifixion left them hopeless and despairing, bear a convincing witness to the transforming reality of the Resurrection, Ascension, and Pentecost events.

      Third, along with a daily meditation on each word, I suggest fifty different daily practices. Please know that these practices will not demand much extra time. Involving simple daily intentions and actions, they are designed to let the new life of the Resurrection and the power of Pentecost flow into our messy lives and broken relationships. Often we find ourselves in life situations where hopelessness and despair rob us of our joy and delight. Life becomes heavy, and we feel overwhelmed and despondent. Often a simple spiritual intention or practice, entered into with simple trust in the risen Christ, brings us alive again with the special kind of aliveness we see in those early disciples at the Resurrection and Pentecost.

      Lastly, I invite you to get together with some friends with whom you can go through this book. Perhaps you can commit to meeting once a week for seven weeks. Begin with a prayer, inviting God to be present, and then let each person share his or her experience of the week’s meditations and practices. Pay special attention to the meditation and practice that were most helpful for each person. Foster a safe space for sharing by keeping confidential what group members share, and try not to correct other persons when you think they are not doing it right. Remember that becoming Easter people in the power of the Spirit is a shared journey.

      In closing, my Eastertide hope for you is that by walking along the path of the Resurrection toward Pentecost, you will be led more deeply into the exhilarating fullness of life promised to us by Jesus. I pray that the joy of the risen Christ will surprise you and fill you with the energy of his Spirit. Here is a prayer that you can pray as you begin

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